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An Eternal Multitude of Despondency

By Adrienne, on August 11th, 2014

Instead of letting me go in an ambulance, my parents drove from Albuquerque to Prescott, Arizona to take me from the tiny regional medical center where I had been for nine days to the much larger hospital in Phoenix.

When they arrived to collect me, I was furious because I was not dead yet, and I was furious at my parents because one time they had wanted to have a baby, and that baby was me. Horrible, miserable, disappointing, useless me.

Somewhere at the back of my skull where depression had driven my better self, I could hear a murmur of words that said, ssssh, be nice. They love you. This is hard for them.

My parents drove me from the hospital to the house where I had been living and gathered my things. We filled my suitcases with the paperback novels I read until I’d gotten too sick to do anything but stare at Green Acres and Make Room for Daddy on Nick at Nite while I sharpened and re-sharpened every knife in the house. My mom put my hamper in the minivan last, telling me she’d do my laundry and bring the clothes to me at the hospital.

I was in the middle seat of our Volkswagen Vanagon while my mom drove the steep, twisting roads out of the mountains and into the pestilential heat of Phoenix. We paused for a funeral procession and I looked at the hearse and I hated its dead passenger with a hot red rage because how dare that asshole get a chance to die when I could not have mine? How could the universe force me to continue to draw breath when so many were allowed to make their escape?

Something broke behind my face, and I don’t know if it was sitting in that seat in the van where I had sat so often as a child, or if it was the presence of my parents (who on that day I hated and loved in equal degree), or if the little green and white capsules (“This drug is so new you’ll always be able to tell people you were one of the first to take it!” chirped the psychiatrist who prescribed it, as if I didn’t have every intention of dying before I ever told anyone anything ever again.) were chiseling away at the deadness in me, but I cried.

I laid down on the brown van seat and bawled. I used up all the tissues in the car, and then the roll of paper towels my parents always carry when they travel. Finally, I crawled into the back to find one of the little travel blankets my mom made when I was twelve and I cried into it and there seemed no end to the tears and snot and suffocating misery. There was no relief in those tears, no purifying release, just more: an eternal multitude of despondency.

My mom parked the car and my dad opened the sliding door. He unbuckled my seatbelt and I walked under his arm, my face covered, and he guided me until I was in a chair in an office with a woman who asked questions. I hated that woman, this intrusive, bossy crab who wanted me to answer her stupid question and sign her ridiculous papers. “I’m sorry, Mr and Mrs Jones, but she’s 18. She has to answer herself,” and she was just another prying, arrogant ass who wanted to stop me from checking the fuck out of this life.

We walked again, me still under my dad’s arm, my swollen, soggy face hidden, and there was a loud clunk and I was seated in a new chair. I cried on. My face was as hot and raw as a knee that has been skinned on pavement after a bad spill from a bicycle, and still I cried on. I leaned into my dad while someone put a tourniquet on my arm and drew blood and someone said, “Excuse me. I need to use the phone.”

I looked up. In front of me, a blonde woman no bigger than a ten-year-old wearing jeans and a housecoat, and behind her, across the room, a mustard-yellow steel door. “We’re here? We’re already here?” I asked, panicked. I was locked in.

“You gonna move or what?” asked housecoat woman, and my mom guided me to a different chair so I wasn’t sitting in front of the row of pay phones on the wall.

“Can’t I come to the hotel with you guys?” I asked my parents. “Just for tonight. I’ll come back tomorrow. I promise! Just take me with you for one night, please? I won’t do anything. I promise. I really promise.”

My dad squeezed my hand. “We have to go now. You need to stay here but we’ll come visit tomorrow.” They each hugged me and I don’t know if I hugged them back.

That night, a nurse gave me a Benadryl to help me sleep and my insomnia snickered at that drug and I spent the night sitting in the day room with my 1:1 aide (the person charged with staring at me every minute lest I find some way to hurt myself in this bladeless, beltless, edgeless, glassless place). The aide lit my cigarettes one after another after another while I stared at the console television with its familiar succession of elderly shows on Nick at Nite. She asked me questions as if I was a child she was humoring at a friend’s party: Do you have any sisters or brothers? Do you like dogs? What was your favorite subject in school? I did not scream at her shut up shut up shutupshutupshutup and eventually she opened one of the magazines in her lap and seemed to be reading it.

The days were long, punctuated by meals we ate in the smoky day room and the counting of returned plastic cutlery after. There was a tray of graham crackers and apple juice from which we could snack between meals, and down the long main hall was a man who was either bedridden or in restraints who screamed curse words at the staff all day until evening when they gave him medicine that made him sleep and we, patients and staff alike, breathed a collective sigh of relief. On the rare occasion I was able to sleep, my roommate woke me to share the triumphant news of her successful vanquishment of ceiling demons. “They would have eaten everyone,” she told me, and I wished she would let them.

My parents drove to Prescott to pick up my car, then my dad drove home in our van while my mom stayed on in Phoenix for a few days. She brought me my clean clothes. She had gotten all the blood off the left leg of my khaki pants and I wished she’d just thrown them away but maybe she needed to scrub and scrub and scrub until it was gone. She couldn’t scrub my hand the way she’d scrubbed the pants and I poked and pulled on the wounds there but they didn’t hurt much anymore.

I was relentlessly cajoled. I was running a low fever and my blood work showed I was dehydrated so the staff brought me cup after cup of soda, tea, and water that I would not drink. They threatened that I would not be allowed off the unit if I didn’t eat but all the food tasted like sand. All the drinks felt like glass in my mouth. I sat in a chair in the day room and listened to my thoughts pummel me and I hoped I would die in my sleep and I smoked my cigarettes and when they brought that green and white pill in a tiny paper cup I swallowed it.

There was a doctor with an accent so thick I couldn’t understand more than about half of what he said. He began to give me diagnoses, one after another, stacking and shuffling them, as if hanging enough words and codes on my emotional reality would cause a spontaneous healing. “Please just give me some medicine to make me sleep,” I said.

“You already have catatonic signs and symptoms,” he said. “A sedative will only make you worse. Don’t worry; when you are tired enough, your body will sleep.”

I shuffled out of his office and my aide took me back down the mustard-yellow hall, through the mustard-yellow door, and seated me in a mustard-yellow chair. She lit my cigarettes until shift change when someone new came to light my cigarettes. I sat sleepless through that night and the next day the doctor said, “You’re a really tough case. You’ll probably need to be in the hospital for a very long time.”

“Please just give me some sleep medicine,” I said, and he refused.

“You’re a tough case for sure,” he said again.

One night, the charge nurse took me to the courtyard with her. She lit a cigarette for me and one for herself and said, “I hear you want to die. Why would you want that? You’re young and pretty and you have everything going for you! I wish I could be young again. I wouldn’t waste it in a place like this.”

I smoked my cigarette and held my beltless robe closed and I did not scream at her shut up shut up shutupshutupshutup. I could not understand why no one but me could see that I was already dead and it was only my stupid body that was keeping me trapped like a ghost among living people.

The nurses told me when to shower and I dutifully soaped and rinsed, my aide watching all the time while the water screamed insults and threats at me. I got out of the shower and lay in a soggy, naked heap on the bed, overwhelmed and unable to decide what clothes to wear. The aide sighed and brought me clean underwear and socks, then put two hospital gowns on me, one open at the back and the other open at the front.

I shuffled back to the day room and smoked cigarettes while the other patients swirled around me, interacting with their hallucinations, arguing over the TV channel, demanding drugs or food or freedom from nurses, aides, and other patients. The man down the long hall howled, hurling his familiar insults in his familiar way and I hoped that soon he would get his haldol or thorazine or whatever they gave to shut him up.

A nurse brought me a cup of orange soda and set it down next to my ashtray. “Drink this,” she said. “Eventually we’ll have to give you an IV if you don’t drink something. How do you think your parents would like that? How can you do this to them? Maybe I’ll take your cigarettes away until you drink something. Maybe I’ll even take your cigarettes away until you speak. Would you like that? No cigarettes as long as you keep sitting there like a statue?”

“Fuck you,” I said.

She looked slapped. “Fine. Drink your soda so I don’t have to call the doctor again.”

“Fuck you,” I repeated.

The nurse walked away. The aide looked at me over her newspaper and chuckled a little. “You might get well after all,” she said.

My stepsister talked the college health centre into letting me take her dog into the clinic (because I was too scared/spooked to enter without the pup), my sister K’s doctors (we come from a family with a boatload of mental illness; the pediatric psych unit was her home-away-from-home) called in a favour and had Sick Kids admit me for a week despite the fact that I was 19, thereby sparing me the hell that is a psychiatric admit via ER.

I haven’t been hospitalized since college (I’m nearly 40), K hasn’t been in going on six years — and we’re both college grads, gainfully employed + happily married. Our mom committed suicide shortly after K was born.

It IS all one life. This, that, the other. The terrible, the beautiful, the harrowing and the deadening, the glinting moments of grace from nowhere. I see you, Adrienne. And you are awesome and this is beautiful and terrible, like everything. xoStacy @bklynstacy recently posted..Proud and Happy

It’s all one life, and I’m glad you’re still in it. Thank you for telling this story. I know it was hard, but the only way out is through. A big hug from me.Ashley recently posted..Sunday Sweetness–Growing Older

IMO talking about this makes your position as an advocate stronger. You know what it is like. And how even the well meaning “trained to help” people don’t always get it; and won’t until we can talk openly about feelings of despair and nothingness. And be heard.

I am sorry that the people assigned to help you were not very helpful. I am very glad that you are here to loan your talents to others and to give voice to difficult aspects of life and to advocate for people who struggle. Love and light to you.Karen D. Austin recently posted..Responding to Robin Williams’ Death

Your words, your tone, everything about this captures that feeling perfectly–that overwhelming compulsion to simply cease to be. Why would you think this would make you be taken less seriously as an advocate? You’ve walked through fire and come out the other side.

Oh…yeah, I think so. Vaguely. I remember the whole thing (that whole summer and most of the fall) the way I remember things from when I was very young, more like a series of snapshots than a narrative.

Wow. Tense — and INtense. I’m glad you and your voice are still here to give witness to what it’s like “in there”. In the head of a person locked away by depression. In the confines of those special places where we’re supposed to be able to “cure” those who cannot exist with the rest of us with ease and aplomb.